Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2015
From The Eponymous Pickle
Graph Databases and Modeling the Internet of Things
Have had a number of conversations on the use of graphical databases lately. It is a good technology to understand. It works well with anything that is interconnected. As are people and any communicating things. Obviously…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building a Mobile Supply Chain
By their nature, supply chains are mobile and real time:" .... Embracing mobility promises to increase visibility and responsiveness in the supply chain when properly leveraged. For these reasons, businesses are more and more…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Searching on Amazon vs Google
Thought about this the other day. Where do I search? Google, Amazon, Wikipedia. My own blog posts. I typically categorize my search need quickly to make a decision. Overlap often exists.
From insideHPC
Three GPU Hackathons Going Global with OpenACC
NCSA, ORNL, and CSCS will host a series of GPU Hackathons in 2015.
From XRDS
Using static analysis to evaluate Java exception handling
Static analysis is a method that one can use in order to analyze, understand, and assess the quality of a program. The main strength of static analysis is the pinpointing of coding errors without the execution of a program. In…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Aging in Place Workshop Report
The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Trans-NIH/Interagency Workshop on the Use and Development of Assistive Technology for the Aging Population and People with Chronic Disabilities have released…
From Schneier on Security
Twitpic
On Monday, I asked Adm. Rogers a question. EDITED TO ADD: The question....
From Putting People First
5 imperatives of user experience design in mobile health technology
David Lee Scher, MD – Owner & Director, DLS Healthcare Consulting discusses what he thinks are five important issues in achieving the ideal mobile technology user experience, specifically for those technologies hoping to enter…
From Putting People First
“I’m divorcing my Nest thermostat”
Kara Pernice, the Managing Director at the Nielsen Norman Group, was a proud early adopter of the unique, cool, and pretty Nest device: “It helped me save energy, and communicated to me. But things went bad when it let me down…
From Putting People First
How do people save/share/revisit on mobile devices?
In early January, Mozilla UX conducted user research to refresh their understanding of how people save, share, and revisit mobile content with the goal of building a knowledge base for a larger contextual research project on…
From insideHPC
CoolIT Systems Cites Growing Demand for Liquid Cooling
Today CoolIT Systems announced 2014 financials and growing demand for the company's Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technologies.
From insideHPC
Cray XC30 Powers LS-DYNA at Stalprodukt
Today Cray announced that Stalprodukt S.A., a leading global steel processor, purchased a Cray XC30 supercomputer for structural analysis modeling used in the testing of steel designs.
From insideHPC
Seagate ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance
The Seagate ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance (SDA) is the HPC industry’s first scale-out secure storage system officially ICD-503 certified to consolidate multiple previously isolated systems, maintain data security, enforce…
From insideHPC
Open Fabrics Workshop to Focus on Application Performance, NVM, and SoCs
Today the Open Fabrics Alliance announced that their upcoming International OFS Developers’ Workshop will center around three major themes: Applications Performance, Non-Volatile Memory, and Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs).
From insideHPC
Video: Inside the Raijin Supercomputer Down Under
In this video, Questacon visits NCI to take a look at Raijin, the southern hemisphere's first petaflop super computer. "Raijin, named after the Shinto God of thunder, lightning and storms, is a Fujitsu Primergy high-performance…
From Schneier on Security
AT&T Charging Customers to Not Spy on Them
AT&T is charging a premium for gigabit Internet service without surveillance: The tracking and ad targeting associated with the gigabit service cannot be avoided using browser privacy settings: as AT&T explained, the program…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Simulations Are More Fun
One of my favorite computer science teachers, Judy Hromcik from Texas, posted a link to a video called “The last banana: A thought experiment in probability.” The video outlines a particular statistical problem.
“Imagine a game…From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of February 23
February 25 Hearing: The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will hold a hearing titled “Preserving the Multistakeholder Model of Internet Governance.” 10 a.m., 253 Russell Building The Communications and Technology…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIH Data Science wants to hear from YOU!
The new NIH Data Science blog needs your help to start a conversation about Computational and Quantitative Collaborative Projects. Excerpt from their blog: Many biomedical challenges require collaborations between biomedical…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
One Instructor's Flipped Classroom Philosophy
Earlier this month, our Education Development Centre hosted a teaching round table on the flipped classroom. At the session, engineering instructor Shermeen Nizami shared her philosophy for flipping her own fourth year undergraduate…
From insideHPC
Video: OpenACC Interoperability with CUDA C and Fortran
"Developed by PGI, Cray, and NVIDIA, the OpenACC directives are a shared vision of how directives can simplify the programming model for accelerators, where each vendor is committed to support a common programming standard." …
From insideHPC
UMBC Powers Climate Research with Dell | Terascala HPC Storage
Today Terascala announced that the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) HPC Facility is using the company's software to manage Lustre-based parallel storage.
From Computational Complexity
Eliminate the Postal Service
It's gotten very difficult to mail a letter these days. There are no mailboxes along my ten mile commute. Georgia Tech has contracted with an outside company to handle outgoing mail. To send a piece of mail requires filling out…
From Schneier on Security
Cell Phones Leak Location Information through Power Usage
New research on tracking the location of smart phone users by monitoring power consumption: PowerSpy takes advantage of the fact that a phone's cellular transmissions use more power to reach a given cell tower the farther it…
From insideHPC
Pearl Hacks Event to Promotes Women Programmers
RENCI is sponsoring this year's Pearl Hacks, a two-day event designed to encourage college and high-school age women to develop their interest in technology.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Technology Disruption in Health Care
Video interview: Dr. Robert Wachter, chief of hospital medicine at UCSF Medical Center and a noted expert on quality and safety, says information technology is disrupting healthcare in unexpected and sometimes unfortunate ways…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An Adaptive Dance of Drones
In NewScientist: Drones continue to advance, their cooperation, adaption and autonomy is particularly interesting.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualizing Sound
In the CACM:" .... In the movies, people often discover their room is bugged when they find a tiny microphone attached to a light fixture or the underside of a table. Depending on the plot, they can feed their eavesdroppers false…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Multi Sensory Computer
In Forbes, on the IBM Chip:Meet The Brain-Inspired Computer Chip That Can Smell, Feel And Hear By Dharmendra S. Modha, Ph.D., IBM ResearchBuilding a computer that could match the power of the human brain has long been a goalIn…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Storeless Generation
How can the 'storeless' generation be won back? Good thoughts important to retail." .... But can a big-box store truly be a third space in the classic Oldenburg sense? Recent research suggests yes, but stores need to make a…